Skype Qik (free) is a rare thing these days—a Windows Phone app that came out at the same time as its iPhone and Android counterparts. The video-messaging app features the same appealing design, too. But is there room for another messaging app, even on Windows Phone, where you can use not only traditional Skype, but also Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Line, or even BBM? The Skype Qik difference is that you communicate with short, Vine-like selfie videos. It's a beautifully designed app, but do you really need another way to message your peeps? Let's find out.

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Qik StartYou don't need a Skype account to use Qik, but, as with many messaging apps (think WhatsApp and Viber), you do need to enter your mobile phone number and grant access to your phone contacts. That makes it easier for you to find people and vice versa. Snapchat and Skype itself, however, do not require you to enter a phone number.

InterfaceQik is simple and beautiful to look at and use. Like Snapchat, it eschews traditional app design to put the most important features up front. Once you've got a few conversations going, your Qik screen shows them as wide bands with the users' names and blurry images. Swiping across these lets you hide them. A cool interface touch is that you can swipe up and down between shooting view and inbox view at any time. As with Snapchat, Qik's messages are impermanent. Any message you send is deleted automatically after two weeks. As with just about every app that has anything to do with photos or videos, with Qik you tap the big lens icon at top center to get going.

When you tap the record button, the screen blacks out, except for the record button and camera view. Michael has come around to Max's preference for the Vine-style hold-down-record-and-release-when-you're-done; Qik instead uses separate presses to start and end recording.

You've got 40 seconds to complete your video message. That's more generous than Vine and Instagram, though the regular old Skype app lets you send video messages of up to 3 minutes. After shooting, you need to choose recipients, unless you did so before shooting. If you've done that, tapping the record button again stops recording and immediately sends your videogram to your friend(s). Choosing a recipient after shooting sends the vid instantly, or you can hit the Plus sign to create a group video chat.

We didn't love that you can't review a recording before sending it. You can, however, simply hit an X if you want to abort the production. Qik seems designed to encourage you to send selfies before you're ready, in the name of immediacy. Its method is more flexible than Facebook Messenger's flinging your vid or pic off as soon as you release the button, but less than Snapchat's letting you review what you shot.

One limitation in Qik is that you can't upload existing video from your phone storage (as you can in Instagram and now Vine), though for an app designed for immediacy, that's not necessarily a minus. Nor can you stop and start recording, as you can in some apps—it's a one-shot affair.

Each conversation includes a row of circular video thumbnails, which you're free to review (or delete) until they expire. When you delete one of your Qik vids, it's immediately deleted from everyone else's phone, too. This isn't so much of an issue with Snapchat or Wickr, since their videos disintegrate upon viewing, though Qik does let you remotely delete videos even before they're viewed.

Qik Fliks are one feature missing in the Windows Phone app but present in the iOS and Android versions. These are reusable short videos that take the place of emoticons. It's a shame that even a Microsoft-owned company produces a Windows Phone app with a feature deficit compared with its mobile platform rivals.

Qik Enough for You?Skype Qik for Windows Phone is well designed and a pleasure to use. We also like its remote message deletion and the fact that messages are ephemeral. The app is pretty bare-bones, even more so in the Windows Phone version, since it lacks Qik Fliks. In some cases, a severely limited feature set can be a plus, but, in the case of a messaging app, you probably want to at least be able to send text. And still photos. Qik is truly video-only, and sending video messages back and forth isn't always the easiest way to communicate. So many apps that most of your pals already have on their phones already include Qik's main capabilities that it will have to expand its feature set before we can give it an unqualified rave review.

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Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web...
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Max Eddy is a Software Analyst, taking a critical eye to Android apps and security services. He's also PCMag's foremost authority on weather stations and digital scrapbooking software. When not polishing his tinfoil hat or plumbing the depths of the Dark Web, he can be found working to discern the 100 Best Android Apps.
Prior to PCMag, Max wrote for the International Digital Times, The International Science Times, and The Mary Sue. He has also been known to write for Geek.com. You can follow him on...
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